Scarleteen

Content warning: gender dysphoria, references to medical and other trauma and harm

Hi everyone,

I’m on day 3 of my pseudo-period (what I call my period-like symptoms that started happening after I started taking HRT), and I’m really wishing it was a real one. I’m super dysphoric about being born male/not being female. I also forgot to take my estrogen this morning, which hasn’t helped.
I’m not gonna list every element of my dysphoria, because some of it is more from trauma than my body, and some of it is just super uncomfortable to write about, but here’s some of it:

• I wish I directly understood what it’s like to be AFAB (periods, exams, etc). I feel guilty that I haven’t had the (horribly common) bad experiences associated with that, and more generally that I don’t know what it’s like for my mom and so many of my friends.

• I wish I had the capability to get pregnant and give birth to kids (and then be a mom to them). I don’t know if I’d ever actually use that capability, and I’d definitely want to get pregnant though IVF or some other reproductive technology, but I really wish I could. I got dysphoric about a month ago that I don’t benefit from health insurance coverage of birth control meds/devices.

• I wish I got “real” (bleeding) periods. I don’t wish for them in the “that sounds fun!” sense (I’ve been told quite a bit that it is anything but), but in the “I’m dysphoric and guilty that I don’t experience this” sense.

I feel super “male” privileged to be wishing for these things/a female body, although I’ve never heard a (cis) guy want these things or be guilty about them, lol. I want to be very clear: if these things make you miserable, or you’ve been hurt because of any of it, that is bad, and I don’t want that for you. The way society harms AFAB people is unacceptable, and I’m aware of that even—especially—when I’m most dysphoric.

- AQ

PS: I’m aware that connecting a person being AFAB with them getting periods and being able to have kids is dubious, but I’m not sure of a better way to describe my dysphoria.

Hey there, AskingQueries. I'm going to kick most of answering you over to someone else, because this one is pretty fraught for me, but I think it might be helpful to you to hear why.

There's no such thing as a universal AFAB body. Not all people -- and I'm one of those -- assigned female sex at birth consider our bodies "female" (as far as I am concerned, that's a very arbitrary assignment, and one that not only presumes our sex is our gender, but which also reduces it to the appearance of our genitals at birth -- in fact, some AFAB people are actually intersex, and some of those folks won't ever have periods, for example) or consider ourselves women. Not all people who have been assigned female sex at birth menstruate, and no one who menstruates menstruates for the whole of their lives, presuming they live long enough to experience menopause (and boy oh boy, is trying to get menopause care fun when you are misgendered nonstop, and finding that even publishing an inclusive and bestselling menopause book makes almost no difference). Heck, many AFAB people don't have a uterus for a lof of their lives. Not all people who have been assigned female sex at birth can get pregnant, carry a pregnancy to term (me again) or give birth.

I don't think we need to directly experience something to understand it. For instance, I feel like I have a pretty deep understanding of what it's like to grow up as a sexual person in this era, because I am soaking in young people's current experiences of this all day, even though it was a very different experience for me than it is for almost every young person now because the era I came up in was so different. If we want to understand how an experience is for someone we haven't had or can't have, asking them to tell us about it and really listening without centering ourselves and with a lot of empathy can go an awfully long way.

Not to mention that even if you'd had a period, for instance, or given birth, that'd only allow you to know about your own experience with those things, things where how people experience them vastly varies, you know? And you actually already do have a pretty good understanding of how some of us experience some or all of this just by virtue of having experienced dysphoria in your own body, having experienced -- or later experiencing -- things like misogyny (some of which can be even rougher on or more dangerous for trans women than cisgender women), or your body doing things that you both don't want or like. <3